The Passage - By Justin Cronin Page 0,106

in a way it hadn’t before. It seemed to be talking right to him. ANY OF THE FOLLOWING SYMPTOMS … One morning, returning from breakfast, he’d felt a tickle in this throat, like maybe he was getting a cold; before he knew it he’d sneezed hard into his hand. His nose had been running a little ever since. Then again, it was spring now, still cold at night but rising into the fifties or even sixties during the afternoon, and all the trees were budding out, a faint haze of green, like a spatter of paint over the mountains. He’d always been allergic.

And then there was the quiet. It took Grey a while to notice what this was. Nobody was saying anything—not just the sweeps, who never spoke much to begin with, but the techs and soldiers and doctors, too. It wasn’t like it happened all at once, in a day or even a week. But slowly, over time, a hush had settled over the place, sealing down on it like a lid. Grey had always been more of a listener himself—that’s what Wilder, the prison shrink, had said about him: “You’re a good listener, Grey.” He’d meant it as a compliment, but mostly Wilder was just in love with the sound of his own voice and happy to have an audience. Still, Grey missed the sound of human voices. One night in the commissary he counted thirty men hunched over their trays, and not one of them was saying a word. Some weren’t even eating, just sitting in their chairs, maybe nursing a cup of coffee or tea and staring into space. Like they were half asleep.

One thing: Grey was fine in the shut-eye department. He slept and slept and slept, and when his alarm went off at 05:00, or noon if, as likely as not, he’d been on the late shift, he’d roll over in bed, light a smoke from the pack on the nightstand, and stay still for a few minutes, trying to decide if he’d dreamed or not. He didn’t think he had.

Then one morning he sat down at a table in the commissary to eat—French toast stamped with butter, a couple of eggs, three sausages, and a bowl of grits on the side; if he was sick it sure hadn’t killed his appetite any—and when he lifted his face to take his first bite, a dripping slab of toast just inches from his lips, he saw Paulson. Sitting there, right across from him, two tables away. Grey had caught sight of him once or twice since their conversation, but not up close, not like this. Paulson was sitting over a plate of eggs he hadn’t touched. He looked like shit, his skin stretched so tight over his face you could see the edges of his bones. For an instant, just one, their eyes met.

Paulson looked away.

That night, checking in for his shift, Grey asked Davis, “You know that guy Paulson?”

Davis wasn’t his usual cheerful self these days. Gone were the jokes and the dirty magazines and the headphones with their buzz saws of leaking music. Grey wondered what in hell Davis did all night at the desk; though it was also true that Grey didn’t know what he himself was doing all night, either.

“What about him?”

But Grey’s question stopped right there; he couldn’t think what else to ask.

“Nothing. Just wondering if you knew him was all.”

“Do yourself a favor. Stay away from that asshole.”

Grey went downstairs and got to work. It wasn’t until later, running a scrub brush around a toilet bowl on L4, that he thought of the question he’d meant to ask.

What is he so afraid of?

What is everyone so afraid of?

They were calling him Number Twelve. Not Carter or Anthony or Tone, though he was so sick now, lying alone in the dark, that those names and the person they referred to seemed like somebody else, not him. A person who had died, leaving only this sick, writhing form in his place.

The sickness felt like forever. That’s the word it made him think of. Not that it would last forever; more that he was sick with time itself. Like the idea of time was inside him, in each cell of his body, and time wasn’t an ocean, like somebody had told him once, but a million tiny wicks of flame that would never be extinguished. The worst feeling in the world. Someone had told him he’d be feeling better soon, much better.